Valoa kansalle

I had to throw away my old synth, for various reasons. Well, I didn't really throw it away, but it will take ages to make anything sort of a product, 'cos certain things weren't really done the way you would want to do them in a reliable software synthesizer.

The good news though is that for past half a year or so, I've been working on a new codebase, and somewhat different concept. The new synth thingie I call 'Valo' and while it's nowhere near finished, it's got to the point where most things work (well, there's no PWM yet and modwheel/aftertouch/velocity support is missing, and MIDI side lacks quite a few things and...) and it makes sound.

At present it has a completely redesigned oscillators, new filter design (well, if you can call a ladder low-pass new anymore these days) and it does all kinds of fancy stuff like mm.. sawtooth and square waves (well actually triangle as well) and it can do stuff like oscillator sync (properly) and the signal path is so non-linear it's a pain to tune everything 'cos when the signal levels change in one place, everything behind it has to be retuned with proper levels again.. which fortunately is not that many things.

I can't say it sounds clean. With all the non-linearities causing intermodulation distortions and noise here and there making everything slightly unstable, it most certainly does not sound very clean. On the bright side, it can sound approximately as clean as your average analog synth.

Yup, there's sample. Thought you'd like one. Some external effects (Kjaerhus Classic-series Chorus/Delay/Reverb) with pretty simple settings to make it sound less dry as the synth itself doesn't have any add-on effects (I'm not a huge fan of those) and currently only ever outputs mono-signal (that might change I think).

The patch itself is a "little of everything" thing with almost everything in the synth in use, including oscillators in synced mode, pitch envelope driving the slave, some (per-voice) distortion to trash it after filter, and finally both LFOs messing with the signal. No manual knob tweaking done. I'm sure you can tell I'm a very good sound designer.